This invention relates generally to ensuring business system performance, and more particularly, to correlating and diagnosing performance data collected from components of business systems to achieve information technology goals and business objectives.
In the developing years of business use of electronic systems, business systems were used primarily for accounting and records keeping functions. As these systems grew in capability and features, business managers began to make use of these capabilities and features in new ways to improve business performance. With the widespread acceptance and use of the Internet for conducting on-line commercial and consumer transactions, these business systems have become increasingly complex and geographically distributed. At the same time, there developed increasing demand for higher performance and increased reliability or “uptime” to satisfy these business needs. This has put greater emphasis and visibility on the role of the information technology (IT) infrastructure of e-commerce businesses, and the people that support these systems. Concurrently, there has developed a trend whereby business managers have a need to play a more active role in IT infrastructure decision-making.
Conducting business over the Internet has created many new challenges that are difficult to manage using conventional approaches. Companies with activities that rely on e-commerce struggle to find solutions that will assist with managing increasingly complex infrastructure while satisfying a more demanding customer base. In particular, downtime costs can have a substantial impact on the gross revenues of an e-commerce organization, as well as losses due to brand erosion and customer dissatisfaction. As these companies become increasingly dependent upon e-Business as a significant source of revenue, the success of the overall business is inextricably linked to the health of the IT infrastructure. The lack of tools to communicate critical information concerning the condition of the IT infrastructure to business managers further complicates this picture. A further complexity is that many e-commerce systems are widely distributed over a large geographic area, where a principle means of communications between parts of the system is via the Internet.
Businesses are further faced with the problem of translating IT organization performance goals into objectives that satisfy the needs of the business. While there is a need for a reliable, high performance infrastructure for executing business processes, there is often a lack of understanding of the impact that systems, applications, and process execution breakdowns have on business objectives, because of the inability to measure IT performance against business objectives. Regarding reliability and performance, existing management tools for heterogeneous and complex business processes offer incomplete and inadequate coverage of individual infrastructure elements. There is a lack of a systems management solution that encompasses the entire execution infrastructure as a single entity, capturing the interrelations between systems, applications, and business processes. A solution must be capable of automatically adapting to constant changes in this execution environment.
It is often difficult for IT organizations to relate the impact of process execution breakdowns to business objectives. Since infrastructure failures are viewed as isolated IT events, the impact on the business is noticed only when a product line manager or analyst sees a change in business performance. A solution is needed that will capture the business process workflows and relate potential and actual infrastructure breakdowns to business process execution, enabling IT and business managers to find a collaborative solution. It is desirable to have a solution that is capable of expediting and automating the remediation process.
IT contributions to the core business are often measured using IT-oriented metrics, rather than metrics that support IT contributions to business goals or corporate strategy. A solution is needed that reports IT performance in terms of business metrics rather than infrastructure performance. By combining business and IT metrics, information may be generated that will enable business decisions to be made based on a correlation of IT performance and business goals.
This environment has created a need for a unified solution for monitoring the health of real-time e-business infrastructures to improve the quality, reliability and total cost of ownership of e-business sites. This translates to the bottom line as greater customer satisfaction, a loyal customer base, and increased revenues. It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a comprehensive solution for correlating collected performance data to detect and identify incipient and immediate system component failures in complex e-business infrastructures.
Another object of the present invention is to enable improved performance of e-commerce systems by diagnosing patterns in collected component performance data to determine a cause of a system component performance reduction in e-business.
Yet another object of the present invention is to provide real-time correlation, prediction and diagnosis of collected performance data from e-commerce system components for evaluating, reporting, and managing e-commerce system configuration, providing predictive and impact analysis, and reducing downtime by detecting incipient failures before there is a significant impact of business performance.